Thursday 16 May 2013 09.19 EDT
First published on Thursday 16 May 2013 09.19 EDT

How does a breakfast-radio DJ do their show on the morning they've lost nearly a million listeners in three months? Chris Moyles would probably have let off some steam by going on one of his close-to-the-bone tirades, no doubt laying the blame with one of his endlessly scolded sidekicks. Capital's Dave Berry would have been told by middle-management to mention nothing about it, heaven forbid he stop making those banal battle-of-the-sexes observations that have tested well with focus groups.

This morning, Nick Grimshaw, after hearing his Rajar fate, compared himself to Eldorado – the failed BBC cruise-ship soap from the 1990s. "It's fine, that lost loads of viewers and it ran for like 20 years, people still reference it all the time. We're the new Eldorado. Oh, apparently it just ran for one year. Oh dear."

It's all part of his shtick – a breakfast show filled with pop-culture references and groaning self-deprecation, one that finds humour in the modern celebrity, the rise and fall of the once famous, and exploits it for all its worth.

I am woken most mornings, not by the radio itself but by the belly laughs of someone in my flat who's already listening. Grimshaw's show can be so quick, cruel and unexpected that it goes beyond the normal "did you hear about this" banter of breakfast radio and moves into genuine comedy. This comes from Grimshaw's encyclopedic knowledge of and endless enthusiasm for all things pop, whether it's a Little Mix video faux-pas or the love life of rapper A$AP Rocky. It makes for a show rich in blink-and-you'll miss-them gags.

It's at its funniest when it's all falling apart. When him and best mate Harry Styles went on air the day after the Brits, coming straight from an after-after-after party without going to sleep, it was so good it made me late for work. Full of real gossip and slurs, it was a world away from the pre-packaged red-carpet chat that was going on at other stations.

That said, there are, of course, questions around how long the breakfast show can continue to haemorrhage listeners. Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley famously performed so badly that they lasted just eight months when they were drafted in to replace Chris Evans. But Grimmy losing a million listeners isn't so bad. He was chosen by Radio 1 to appeal to younger listeners, which, naturally, means losing older ones. More than three quarters of the listeners that have drifted in the last quarter are over 25. The average age of listener is at a two-and-a-half year low. Moyles was also losing a lot of listeners to Evans before he left, so Grimshaw would have to mount a landslide swing before he starts to gain new listeners. (Take a quick look at Grimshaw's Instagram account, where his posts are regularly accompanied by abusive, sometimes homophobic, comments from people hashtagging #teammoyles – perhaps he's better without some of the old contingent, anyway.)

The style of the Radio 1 Breakfast Show has long been at odds with the rest of the station. Steve Wright stayed there long after the night of the long knives, when most of the station's older DJs were fired. Evans was in a lads'-mag vacuum when the station was hiring alternative comedians such as Chris Morris and Stewart Lee. Moyles showed contempt for the station's forward-thinking dance and rap-based music policy.

For a show as obtuse, hilarious, and unrelenting as Grimshaw's, 5.8 million listeners is actually pretty impressive. Finally, Radio 1 has found a DJ that can be both anarchic and on-message, one who gets the listenership, and talks to them rather than taking the piss out of them. At a publicly funded station trying to prove its worth, that's worth a million listeners, easily.